Yep, GS has some careful navigation to do. Their new 9RA5 thermocompensated spring drives are quite impressive.
A hand assembled, hand black-polished (hands, case, bracelet and all!), and fully in-house manufactured watch - this cannot be found outside GS until you hit $30k-$50k haute houses.
Even Rolex only black polishes a few movement parts and makes use of part picker tools and outsourced parts to assemble >1mil watches a year.
GS indexes are placed by hand, by eye, by one person using pure experience! By contrast they hand make 30k watches a year.
But as you said, does that matter to the global consumer when $10k gets you a Rolex? We will see! Maybe they become the next haute brand eh?
This image causes an impending sense of doom